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During today's Apple earnings call, CFO Peter Oppenheimer announced that Mac OS X 10.7, better known as OS X Lion, will be launching tomorrow on the Mac App Store. Lion will be available as a 4 GB download, and will sell for $29.99. Once purchased, you can install it on all Macs that you own at no extra cost, and without any sort of authorization key. Apple is touting 250 new features in Lion, with things like Launchpad (an app launcher that is reminiscent of iOS,) Mission Control (a replacement for Expose,) Resume, touch gestures, and more included. Lion Server will also be available as a $50 add-on.

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Hot on the heels of the Apple seeding the OS X Lion Golden Master to developers, we're now hearing that Apple is planning on releasing that very same build to the world on July 14th, exclusively on the Mac App Store for $29.99. Of course, these plans can change is devs find any showstopping bugs in the Golden Master, but barring that extremely unlikely occurrence, you should be all set to get in on Apple's new hotness in just under two weeks.

Apple has just released the golden master version of OS X Lion to Mac developers. We already know that the final, public release of Lion will be coming on July 14th, so it makes sense that Apple would be ready to give the stamp of approval on today's release, as golden master means that , barring any glaring oversight, that this is the final version that customers will be able to purchase in the Mac App Store for $29.99. The build number on the release is 11A511, and Mac devs, you can download it now.

It wouldn't be a weekend without a brand-new Apple rumor to feast upon. And today's no exception: According to Cnet's Brian Tong, unidentified sources have told him that Apple's going to launch an upgraded Mac Pro and Mac mini this fall.

Details on the configurations are scant, save for the two obvious upgrades that Apple would want to put in a refreshed system line: Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs and Thunderbolt connections. The timeline for the systems is a little nebulous as well—the systems could appear in late July or early August, though Tong claims that an August launch is the more likely scenario. Expect the refreshed systems to feature Mac's latest operating system iteration, OS X Lion.

Tong's source is allegedly the same individual that correctly predicted an early May refresh of Apple's iMac line—lo and behold, new iMacs sporting Intel's quad-core Sandy Bridge processors and Thunderbolt support hit stores on May 3.

Hot on the heels of the release of OS X Lion Developer Preview 4 at WWDC 2011, Apple has already released the next update to the Lion build. No details yet on the fixes/additions/improvements in this one, but if you are running the latest OS X 10.7 Preview, you can find this update waiting for you in Software Update. Go ahead and run it, and if you find anything interesting, do let us know, mmkay?

Borrowing a tiny page from Google's Chrome OS, Apple has snuck a feature into its upcoming OS X Lion release that allows users to reboot their systems into Safari.

Why would you bother doing that? In a word, security. When you elect to restart your system into Safari, you're effectively placing the Web browser into a sandbox. When it boots, your system will give any users with physical access to your machine the ability to surf the Web. But that's it. Users won't be able to access the system's files or applications.

And thanks to Lion's new auto-save and application restoration capabilities, users that slap their systems in Safari-only mode will be able to restore back to their full desktop exactly as they left it. Since Safari mode runs off of a system's recovery partition, you'll still be able to access the Web and research new methods for fixing your system should your primary partition suffer some catastrophic upset.

The comparison to Chrome OS stems from the fact that Google's operating system runs entirely Web-based: The browser is the primary method for interacting with the system. There's no underlying desktop layer to speak of.

Hey, we know you wanna get a look at all the goodness announced this morning at the WWDC 2011 keynote, right? I mean, OS X Lion, iOS 5, and iCloud are Apple's new triumverate of dominance, and it would be nice to see it all unfold in front of your eyes. Just hit the link below, and you can stream the entire thing from the cloud on pretty much any device.

For all you peeps out there with Mac Developer accounts, you'll wanna grab the latest OS X Lion Developer Preview 4 build that Apple just released. This morning at its WWDC 2011 keynote, the company re-introduced us to many of the OS X 10.7 Lion features that we were already familiar with, but this time things have a lot more fit and finish on them. Lion will launch next month at $29.

We've been updating you on the progress of Lion as the updates have been fairly often in the Developer Preview. Today at WWDC 2011, Phil Schiller announced that OS X 10.7 Lion will be launching next month, exclusively on the Mac App Store, for the amazingly low price of $29. An updated Developer Preview of the next big operating system from Apple will be available later today.

This morning, Apple put out a press release letting the world know that they'll be showing off iOS 5, OS X Lion, and iCloud, their long-awaited cloud service/MobileMe revamp, next week at WWDC. Oddly enough, Apple only went as far as naming iCloud, and called it an "upcoming cloud services offering." Now, we aren't expecting them to go into full detail in a press release, but why even name it at all? We're guessing it's because Apple really wants to set the expectation that WWDC will be focusing on software, softening the blow that will inevitably come when the masses are complaining about the lack of an iPhone 5 hardware reveal. The press release lets us know Apple's WWDC intentions and plans, and sets the expectations accordingly.

WWDC kicks off in six days, and of course, we'll have details of all the announcements as they're made. By the way, the press release also confirms that the incomparable Steve Jobs will be taking the stage at WWDC.